./ \ THE NEW YORKER park, neighbors called her the chicken baby. " As business began to improve, the Kublanovs took in a partner, then an- other, and began looking for ways to expand. They agreed on pizza. Simon: "It looked like the easiest to do. All you need is dough, a dough mixer, a refrigerator, an oven, cheese, and tomatoes. So we took out a loan and bought the equipment on time. For recipes, I went to seminars at food shows, ate pizza all around town, and went home to practice. This was hard. In Russia, you had one kind of flour, one kind of cheese, one kind of yeast, and for spices you had salt and pepper. Here it was hard to figure out even what kind of flour was best-high glu- ten, low gluten, bleached, unbleached. I tried many combinations." Anya: "I was the guinea pig. You can't imagine how many pizzas I ate." The Kublanovs decided to concen- trate on Chicago-style deep-dish pizza, because it reminded them of a staple of Russian cooking, baked meat pie, and their decision led them to concoct a plan that, Anya says, "seemed very logical at the time." The customers would come in for a slice of pizza, then be seduced Into tasting an authen- tic Russian meat pie cooked in the same ov- en. In the name of economy, Anya de- signed an all-purpose sign for the front of the new store: against a background of shiny red plastic, big yellow letters spelled ou t "THE PIE," with the "P" in the shape of a mustachioed chef wearing a white toque. The Pie opened in the summer of 1987. Business was so slow at first that the Kubla- novs' partners chose to cut their losses and get out But the Kublanovs hung on. Anya: "Simon is not the person to take de- feat. " Simon: "I say to my- self, I make it or I die. It was clear the pies were not popular. So '11\ we tried a short Rus- f k \ , I -- 0..,,:. OUT -o #TOWN MAl sian menu-beef stroganoff and a few other dishes-for take-out. Customers started to order, and they wanted more. W e knew we had to convert from pizza. But it was hard, because we still had payments to make on the equip- ment. As soon as we could, we auc- tioned everything off and changed the store over " The Kublanovs redecorated from top to bottom in ten days. Anya swiftly turned out seven large paintings and covered a wall of white tiles with vines and flowers in acrylic paint and gold lacquer on a black background (in the decorative style known as Palekh, after a Russian village of that name), and also created the menu. The sign re- mained, and that meant retaining the name. But, with the pizza oven and the dough mixer gone, Simon could no longer bake meat pies in bulk, and, since it was embarrassing for a res- taurant called The Pie to have no pie on the menu, he consulted a collec- tion of nineteenth -century Russian cookbooks he had brought with him from the Soviet Union, and came up with a house special: layers of sau- téed chicken, mushrooms, and onions in white sauce alternating with lay- ers of blini. On the menu this dish ,. _...d, t r LOCAL MAIl. r- fb " U , : I " j \-.r I .. PROPOSED ::C ON.$" rUTI L... " E T>ME S 0 \ " , " , ' , ' ., ..' , -- 1.IL_ 1 _ ,^ ".. 23 is known simply as "THE PIE." Simon's friends in the restaurant business tell him that he is crazy to offer so many different dishes for lunch and dinner. "They say this is not a menu, it's a cooking book," he says. "But we have neighborhood customers who come in two, three times a week. They need variety." Anya's paintings are also popular with The Pie's clientele. "People want to buy them off the walls," she says. "But what would we put in their place? When you work twelve, fourteen hours a day, who has time to paint?" Finally IF' J IMMY MONTANA and his friends Joey Gubalini and Vinny Bumbats, three stalwart masters of irony, were in excellent spirits when we ran across them the other morning at the north- east corner of Fourteenth Street and Sixth Avenue. "We meet here every day just waiting for this to happen," Jimmy Montana said. "Finally, today, it happened." Their attention was fixed on a steel- mesh wastebasket on the sidewalk a couple of doors away from the recently shuttered Dream Donut & Coffee Shop. Inside the waste- basket were a cup, a Burger King bag, the spokes of an umbrella, a copy of the travel sec- tion of the Sunday Times, and a rat. Ac- tually, the rat-on the evidence, the least street-smart rodent in the five boroughs- was only partly inside the basket. The rat had squeezed through one of the diamond-shaped holes of the mesh and then, as if following a yoga manual with some missing chapters, had done aU-turn and squeezed through the adjoining hole, incar- cerating itself. We happened to be negotiating with a vender on the opposite side of Sixth Avenue- buying a couple of ba- nanas, which, along with a cranberry muf- % ""'" I JUl Ø"I& ,_ i ""+....